How to Give Away Half a Continent

In my book The Break-up of Australia, published in 2016, the endpapers contained a map from the Native Title Tribunal showing how much land had been ceded to Aboriginal groups since the Keating Labor government’s Native Title Act of 1993. When I first saw the map I was more than surprised by how much of the Australian continent had been given away by this court. The map showed that, as a result of the tribunal’s determinations, some 30.4 per cent of the continent was owned by Aboriginal people in 2016. What’s more, the tribunal had accepted claims, which it had still to formally determine, for another 31.7 per cent of Australian land. That is, by the time this second batch of claims had been determined, 62.1 per cent of the Australian continent would be in Aboriginal hands. At the time, this seemed an extraordinary figure. What was equally extraordinary was that none of this data had attracted any interest from the journalists and editors of our fourth estate.

Last week, I…